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Bellum omnium contra omnes

Whirlpools

Pic of the day: Wild Sea Breaking on the Rocks, from The Famous Scenes of the Sixty States, by Hiroshige Utagawa

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Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.

George Santayana

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Whirlpools and eddies in the waters of life pull us all this way and that, towards storms of the heart and mind, pulling us towards actions and events at once necessary and daunting that show our character. When we are not strong enough to pull away from these tidal flows we are pulled under by events, and we swim ever harder away from them, in an attempt to save ourselves from whatever is at the heart of those disruptions. Usually the whirlpools are in some way of our own making. And in trying to pull away from them we try to pull away from the consequences of our actions, to pull away to a world where action and consequence are disconnected, if not for the world, then at least for us personally.

The tidal flow I seek to run from is the same one that a lot of us are running from, it’s an economic one. I was fired from a job I had over three and a half years ago, and the repercussions are still being felt today. Probably will for the rest of my life. It meant a loss not only of the job, which was traumatic enough after working at the place for 13 years, but also the loss of a sense of security. I honestly thought that I was going to work their until I retired. I was looking forward to that. And even though the job was to be honest a lousy one, that thought, that feeling of security, made all the crap I had to deal with alright.

Job gone. Security gone. No health insurance. No more retirement, now I work til I die. And the maelstrom pulls not just me, but those around me, those that are part of my life. If I have a better job and more money coming in, my wife doesn’t have to work so damn hard, and doesn’t take all the jobs that she has. She writes a great number of blogs for a great number of sites. Thirteen or fourteen if I remember correctly.

It was fourteen or fifteen a few days ago. And the one she lost was the one that made her the most money. It is a fairly large financial hit she is taking. And as a consequence I am taking. When I barely make enough to make ends meet here as it is.

Neither her losing her gig nor I losing mine was a product of us being bad people, or doing the wrong thing. Neither. We seem to have been bitten by bad luck, or difficult circumstances if you don’t (like me) believe in the concept of luck. I was canned the day the market bottomed in 2009. Coincidence? When the place I worked for represented a great many of those firms? I think not. My wife got the boot because the business owner at the place she was working for was hemorrhaging money.

That wasn’t her fault, but the company let her and a number of other people go. Because in business, the bottom line is more important than the people whose bottom line is the jobs they work at. Everybody loses and everybody suffers in this equation. Is it our fault? Kinda. We can’t lose the job if we don’t find it in the first place. We can’t lose the sense of security a job creates if we feel secure with or without that job in the first place.

But at the same time we need work to make us money so we can live in the world our ancestors created for us and which we have to live in by necessity. Tis a sad legacy though, that people have become less important than an object (in this case money) the society they live in create. The world revolves around money. People are, in that sense, less important than money, at least to the people who make decisions about who stays and who goes.

She will survive, as will I, but the whirlpools and eddies seem a lot closer now than they were a few days ago, and their tidal pull a lot stronger. But we will swim this ocean together and find a way to more peaceful waters.